Policy

  • The AfD are the biggest winners of the EU’s political ad regulation

    Online political advertising didn’t decide the Saxony-Anhalt election. But its disappearance probably helped shape the result.

  • Better regulation for digital political advertising in the UK

    The overall goal of political advertising reform and regulation in the UK should be to foster a transparent, trustworthy, diverse, and competitive political advertising market. Over more than a decade of study, our research has found that the benefits of digital political advertising generally outweigh the costs, but this gap could be (positively) widened with…

  • Restoring the Integrity of UK Election Campaigns

    Public confidence in the fairness of UK elections is being eroded by opaque money flows, globalised digital campaigning, and outdated regulatory frameworks. Without decisive, creative Government reform, elections will continue to be legally compliant but publicly distrusted – undermining democratic legitimacy. We set out ideas for overcoming the key challenges.

  • Changes to Trends (Nov 2025)

    Over the last few months, we’ve been working on a major update to our Trends political advertising tracker. From today, those changes are live. Here’s an explanation of what we’ve done: 1. Expanded data access now requires a free login Trends tracks activity by over 125,000 political advertisers, across more than 1,000 political parties and…

  • Meta and Google’s Ad Ban Upends Political Campaigning in Europe

    Originally published in Tech Policy Press, 22nd Oct 2025 The collective decision by Meta and Google to ban political, social and issue-based ads in the European Union, citing the European Union’s new Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising (TTPA) regulation, is a seismic shift that will fundamentally reshape political campaigning across the continent. Some will…

  • Does US ownership of TikTok matter for political ads and campaigns?

    TikTok is about to be split in two. The largest social media market in the world, the US, will soon forcibly acquire the company’s American operations and put it in the hands of a conglomerate of tech and media billionaires. They will be able to run it however they choose. How might the two TikToks…

  • Studying the monetisation of low-credibility content

    We worked with Science Feedback to examine the financial infrastructure that enables misinformation in Europe. We performed a broad, multi-methods analysis of advertising and monetisation practices across major social media services offering ads to look at the difference in the monetisation rates of low- and high-credibility content. Read the full report and research. We’re grateful…

  • The disappearing ad library

    This weekend, seven years after it first launched in the US, the Meta Ad Library (MAL) stops growing. When it launched in 2018, Meta (then Facebook) said it would store a comprehensive, searchable database of political ads on its services for seven years. Since then, the MAL has been used by academics, journalists, civil society…

  • Building realtime maps

    We’ve wanted to build realtime maps of where ads are being targeted for a long time. Ideally, we want to combine that with data about how much is being spent in particular places, and being able to show the political competition underway there. In 2024, we had our first go at doing that, where we…

  • Why do we keep running our browser extension?

    Who Targets Me’s first product was our browser extension. Before Meta offered an ad library, it allowed us to crowdsource the political ads people were being targeted with and better explain which ads were showing up to different people in different places, and how those ads were targeted. It still does, but the extension now…